| Thursday, April 12, 2007 |
| LET'S TALK ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING |
HISTORY OF A HOT TOPIC
In the relatively short span of the awareness of global warming, our role in causing it has gone from contested hypothesis to near certainty. How our knowledge has evolved - and how we've reacted.
1827 French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Fourier recognize that the Earth's atmosphere, like "glass vessel", traps heat from sunlight. The phenomenon later becomes known as the "greenhouse effect".
1896 While scientists are theorizing that industrial burning of fossil fuels could raise the Earth's temperature, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius is the first to quantify how much dioxide emissions. "We are evaporating our coal mines into air", he writes.
1970 First Earth Day. Environmental awareness grows and green movements gain ground.
1985 British and American scientists discover a hole in the layer of ozone over the Antartic. Famine in Africa and other environments disasters capture public attention in the mind - '80's as global warming becomes more prominent in mainstream politics.
1988 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is created by the United Nations Rep. Claudine Schneider introduces the Global Warming Prevention Act, the first significant U.S. legislation aimed at mitigating global warming; Congress passes half of the bill.
1990 First IPCC report finds Earth has warmed 0.5 degrees Celsius in the past century. Though it remians uncertain over whether warming is due to human acitivity, the report leads to negotiations toward an international agreement on climate change.
1992 The first global-warming treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), calls for reversing warming and sets the goal of cutting emissions to 1990 levels by 2000.
1997 The Kyoto Protocol is proposed. Pres. Bill Clinton signs the treaty but never submits it to the Senate, which says it must first see "meaningful participation" from developing nations before ratifying.
2005 Without U.S. participation, Kyoto takes effect in August, Hurricane Katrina prompts debate over whether the unusually severe hurricane season is the result of global warming.
2006 "An Inconvenient Truth", a documentary on Al Gore's campaing to draw awareness to climate change, is released.
2007 IPCC report says, with at least 90 percent certainly, global warming is man-made and will "continue for centuries". A second report predicts that, in the coming decades rising temperatures and sea levels will cause foods and mass famine.
(Source NEWSWEEK MAG on GLOBAL WARMING by: Marc Bain) |
| posted by infraternam meam @ 10:29 PM |
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Name: infraternam meam
Home: Chicago, United States
About Me: I am now at the prime of my life
and have been married for the past 25 years.
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